6th August 2010 Archive

Avere, the maker of the multi-tiered filer accelerator FTX products, has picked up another $17m in funding. It aims to "rapidly expand production and distribution of its FXT Series appliances that accelerate the performance and reduce the costs of NAS environments."

Supercomputermaker Cray narrowly missed its projected revenue targets for the second quarter, but is revving up to bring home the bacon in the second half of the year as it delivers its new XT6 and XE6 massively parallel supers.

Features in the four major browsers designed to cloak users' browser history often don't work as billed, according to a research paper that warns that users may get a false sense of security when using the built-in privacy settings.

Unlike the current wave of Freeview HD recorders coming on stream right now, the Panasonic DMR-XW380 is not just a twin tuner hard drive recorder, but a DVD recorder too. Pay a fair bit extra and you can have opt for DMR-BW880, the Blu-ray version Reg Hardware reviewed recently.

While Unified Communications (UC) is not quite mass market, the number of organisations giving it the once-over is growing. Hype aside, UC is something that companies will find themselves adopting quite simply because fragmented communications in the workplace are increasingly common, which causes problems for the general workforce and IT staff alike. Add to this the fact that employees sitting at their desks from 9am to 5:30pm is no longer a reality for many businesses and, grudgingly perhaps, UC begins to make sense.

NASA has postponed today's planned spacewalk to replace a failed ammonia pump assembly on the International Space Station, and Tracy Caldwell Dyson and Doug Wheelock will now exit the orbiting outpost tomorrow at 10:55 GMT.

It is no secret that I have little use for endpoint anti-malware protection apps. In my experience they are all, regardless of vendor, virtually worthless. A well written piece of modern endpoint anti-malware will briefly inform you that you have been infected right before it commits seppuku and vanishes, leaving you to deal with the malware and all the little friends it downloaded.

New Zealand's Parliament met to discuss the pending Three Strikes legislation this week, with the Law Society chipping in. The amendment is too vague, onerous on the ISPs, and too gentle on serial freetards, the Society's government liaison Clive Elliott says.

The security threat from carelessly ditched computers increasingly applies to a much wider range of office equipment, as sophisticated storage technology finds its way into humble devices such as fax machines and printers.

The Sun went mad this week, belching an especially huge quantity of superhot plasma straight at the Earth. The plasma cloud struck the Earth's magnetic field last night, causing the Northern Lights to go haywire. You lot were all about beauty and doomsaying.

Starcraft II has been a long time coming and regardless of whether you’re a real-time strategy fanboy or not, Blizzard’s newest release for PC and Mac has generated quite a buzz. It promises to fill a void that has been sorely felt in the console-based wars of recent years.

SpaceX, the rocket company founded and bankrolled by famous PayPal nerdwealth icon Elon Musk, has revealed radical plans for a colossal launcher as big as the Saturn Vs which sent men to the Moon - and has also proposed nuclear-powered spaceships to carry astronauts to Mars.

Chip market researcher iSuppli says in its latest forecast for 2010 that semiconductor sales are "already pumped up by bulging demand" but that this year it has "been injected with a powerful dose of growth steroids." And thus, iSuppli is raising its chip revenue forecast for the year.

The internet's next-generation addressing scheme is so radically different from the current one that its adoption is likely to cause severe security headaches for those who adopt it, a researcher said last week.

Researchers have identified a kernel-level vulnerability in Windows that allows attackers to gain escalated privileges and may also allow them to remotely execute malicious code. All versions of the Microsoft OS are affected, including the heavily fortified Windows 7.

Somewhere in California, Carly Fiorina must nearly have choked to death from laughter while stumping for a US Senate seat as news of her successor's sudden departure broke following a sexual-harassment probe.